Article Archive

Second Amendment Task Force responds to Attorney General's comments on 'Assault Weapons'

Editor's Note: As you read this press release, please take special note of the lack of a single Ohio congressman on the list. It is time to contact yours and find out why!

WASHINGTON D.C. - U.S. Congressman Dan Boren, (OK-2) and U.S. Congressman Paul Broun, (GA-10), Co-Chairs of the Second Amendment Task Force (SATF) in the U.S. House of Representatives, released the following statements regarding Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent comments on the possibility of the Obama Administration seeking to reinstate a ban on sales of assault weapons.

The whys and wherefores of the ammo shortage

By Bob Owens

If you, like thousands of other Americans, have Googled to find out why we are in the middle of a nationwide ammunition shortage, you would have stumbled across this 2007 blog entry.

In it, I corrected a poorly researched Associated Press story by Estes Thompson that claimed the military's consumption of ammunition was responsible for police ammunition shortages here in the United States. Few things could have been further from the truth, but it seems rather apparent, in retrospect, that the goal of that AP article wasn't to find the truth as much as it was to (falsely) lay blame for the police ammunition shortages at the feet of George W. Bush.

The real fact of the matter is that the military got the bulk of its small arms (pistol, rifle, machine gun) ammunition from one contracted ammunition plant, and that plant wasn't even running near capacity. The military's consumption clearly wasn't to blame, and anecdotal evidence and statements from ammunition manufacturers strongly suggested that police departments themselves caused the 2007 ammunition shortage by purchasing far more ammunition than they had in the past.

But what is causing our current ammunition shortages here in 2009?